Reasons of State (27 page)

All went well until the first night of
Tosca
, when something very unusual happened: at the end of the second act, when Floria buried her knife in Scarpia’s chest, a torrent of applause exploded from the upper seats and persisted for so long that the orchestra had to stop playing. As nothing had been sung at this moment of the action to justify such enthusiasm, Maria Jeritza didn’t know what to do—she was making her début that night—except move the candlesticks to right and left of the corpse of a Titta Ruffo who was as stupefied as she was. Finally a shout from above of: “Death to the
sbirros
! Down with Valverde!” gave a meaning to this thunderous applause and caused Tosca to leave the stage, the curtain to descend rapidly, and the orchestra to remain dumb with bewilderment, while the police broke in among the gods and arrested everyone who hadn’t time to escape down the staircase. Next day Giordano’s
Andrea Chénier
was given in a theatre surrounded by troops and under military occupation by officers in full dress uniform, strategically placed in stalls and galleries. Even so, during the Revolutionary Tribunal a cry of “Viva Robespierre!” went up from some situation unknown.

From now on every opera was the occasion for ovations, murmurs, hissing, and exclamations that had nothing to do with the quality of the music or aptness of the interpretation. Outlaws, regicides, rebel troubadors, and Hernanis were always applauded; informers, governors, Uskoks, stool pigeons, and Spolettas were hissed. The Head of State thought it advisable to cancel Giordano’s
Siberia
, and now awaited with irritation and impatience the performance of
Aida
that was to close the season. For this, unheard-of scenic effects
were projected. The New York firm of Leady had provided the straight trumpets for the triumphal march. Camels and elephants from a recently arrived circus would figure in the procession, followed by fifty horsemen from the third battalion of Hussars, dressed as Egyptians and carefully made up, unless their natural complexions gave them a sufficiently Nubian or Ethiopian appearance. And no performance ever began so brilliantly as to scenery, production, the action of the chorus, and the skill of the orchestra, which had enormously improved during the last few weeks under the direction of an energetic and confident conductor. The clothes and décor were praised; “Ritorna vincitor” was encored as expected, and the second act opened in an atmosphere of tension, anticipation of pleasure, and general appreciation of scenery, singers, and production as the action approached the concerted paroxysm of the return of Radames. The famous theme of the march was hummed by the entire audience. And the great final scene arrived, with two hundred persons assembled between columns and palm trees, Horus and Anubis and the Nile as background—a Nile picked out with electric lights—when suddenly there was a terrific explosion in the orchestra pit under the footlights, sending cymbals, violin cases, tympani and kettle drums flying in a sudden cloud of white smoke. A second bomb exploded beneath the double basses, causing the musicians to clamber onto the stage and try to escape through the pit and boxes, increasing the panic in the audience, who rushed helter-skelter towards the exits, jumping over stalls, pushing, screaming, trampling on anyone who fell down in the mad rush, while the flies collapsed on the heads of Pharaoh’s guards, priests, archers, captives in chains, and soldiers of the third battalion of Hussars as they ran, fought, and struggled to get to the doors into the street, among fallen obelisks, sphinxes, and broken scenery.

“The Hymn! The Hymn!” yelled the Head of State to the Bolognese conductor, who had remained on the rostrum, pale and vociferating as he tried to control his disbanded orchestra. But as only seven or eight musicians were left, the only response to his cries of “The Hymn! Quick! The Hymn!” came from an almost inaudible wail of four violins, a clarinet, oboe, and cello.

While the public gathered in the square outside, trying to pluck up their courage, and those who had been bruised or kicked (none were really wounded) were carried from the theatre in the arms of the police, the Head of State found out that the explosions had come not from bombs but large petards emitting noise and smoke.

“The performance must go on,” he said to Adolfo Bracale, who had bravely accompanied him on this tour of inspection, followed by the electricians. But it was impossible; the theatre was full of the smell of gunpowder, the scenery was ruined, the parchment of the drums had burst, the double basses were in splinters, the curtain wouldn’t come down, several members of the chorus had been hurt in the rush, the horses of the triumphal procession were kicking and biting, and Amonasro had lost his voice. The victim of a nervous crisis, Amneris had shut herself in her dressing room and was shouting that this was what came of singing in a country of savages. As for Caruso-Radames, he had disappeared. As someone remembered having seen him go out at a back door, they hunted for him in vain in bars and cafés near the building. Nor had he returned to his hotel. He might have been hurt, hit, or perhaps he was lying in a faint in some dark corner. The impresario was anxiously looking for him when a short circuit left the theatre without lights.

The Head of State returned to the palace, followed by his ministers and generals. His silence at such a time expressed
a rage that went far beyond mere rage. An inner rage, shut in upon itself, a violent nervous crisis expressed in a terrible fixed stare, unaware of the faces confronting him, an apocalyptic stare apparently directed at distant visions in which tempests, screams, and retribution figured. He was in this state of intolerable tension when the telephone rang in the Council Chamber. His Excellency the Italian Minister was calling. He informed them that Enrico Caruso had been arrested in the street by a policeman for wearing fancy dress when it was not carnival time, and women’s clothes moreover, and with ochre-coloured make-up and painted eyes and mouth—such were the details of the accusation; this made him subject to the Law of Repression of Scandalous Behaviour and Defence of Civic Morality, whose Article 132 anticipated thirty days’ imprisonment for an attempt on decent living, and unbecoming behaviour in public, with increased punishment if it were accompanied by manifest evidence of homosexuality in personal attire and appearance, which in the present case was plainly shown by a coiffure of horizontal strands brought down over the forehead, ornamental rings in the ears, fancy bracelets, and around the neck several chains adorned with scarabs, amulets, charms, and stones of colours that—according to the police report—were a sure indication of being “queer.”

“This to happen, in a civilised country!” cried the Head of State, passing from his dramatically silent rage to verbal explosion, at the same time throwing books, paperweights, and inkpots onto the carpet. But he did what was necessary. And it was Doctor Peralta who rescued Enrico Caruso from confinement; the singer arrived, much amused and still dressed as Radames, saying that it was nothing, and that he and his ambassador wished to recommend the policeman who had arrested him—“a good chap, splendid fellow, only doing his
duty”—to the President’s indulgence (“he was merely carrying out the law, he had never seen an ancient Egyptian in the streets of the capital”), and everything came to an end in the light of dawn with drinks and Havana cigars—long, thick cigars such as the singer liked best, whose trademark was the blond, blue-eyed head of Fonseca.

The Tutelary Volcano emerged from its cold mists, the Mayorala Elmira brought sandwiches and fruit juice, and before he left, Adolfo Bracale announced that the opera season would definitely close with Verdi’s
Un ballo in maschera
that night—
Aida
was out of the question after the disaster.

“A masked ball is what I shall give those brutes who go planting petards,” said the Head of State to Doctor Peralta before going to bed.

And now there began to arise above the city a round building—round as a bullring, round as the Coliseum in Rome, round as a circus for contortionists and lion tamers: it was the Model Prison, based on the most modern ideas of penitentiary construction invented by North American architects, who were masters of that art. Accustomed to the slow progress of stone buildings—the sawing-up of stone provided a lesson in stereotomy, demonstrating theorems with hammer and chisel—and the very long time needed to produce their main bulk and details, the Head of State had now discovered the magic of building in concrete. Gravel and sand rotated in enormous grey iron cocktail shakers, plates of cement miraculously hardened and tightened over a metal skeleton; the city witnessed the marvel of a building that started by being liquid, a soup full of gravel and pebbles, before it rose with astonishing verticality, placing walls on walls, floors on floors, cornices on cornices, until—in a matter of days—it reached the sky with a flagstaff or a gilt statue with winged ankles. And since the Head of State had fallen in
love with the speed of concrete, with the fidelity of concrete and the docility of concrete, he had entrusted concrete with the task of closing the gigantic circle of the Model Prison (on the Hill of La Cruz above the cupola of the Capitol, above the spire of the Sacred Heart) before he started a political operation on a large scale. Day and night, by the light of reflectors when darkness or fog made them necessary, work continued on this exemplary building, whose concentric walls had the euclidean beauty of a series of orbits whose radii grew progressively smaller, enclosing one another, until reaching the axis of a central patio, whence watch could be kept on all the cells and corridors. When the work was finished and nothing was left to do but bring the aluminium bathtubs, and armchairs with buckles and straps destined for some of the underground rooms (these figured on the plans as “technical annexes”), photographs of this beautiful building were sent to several international reviews of architecture, and it was much praised for its functional qualities as well as for solving the difficulty of harmonizing something necessarily grim in appearance with the beauty of the surrounding landscape. Here could be seen an evident and perhaps unique attempt to humanise—the aim of architecture being to help man to live—the conceptual and organic vision of a penitentiary establishment, thus making it tolerable to the delinquent, who after all (as modern psychologists had shown) was a sick man, an antisocial being, usually the product of his environment and victim of heredity, whose behaviour had been distorted by certain things that were just beginning to be called “complexes,” “inhibitions,” etc., etc. The days of Venetian prisons and the dungeons of the Inquisition were over, or of the fortresses of Ceuta or Cádiz—so similar to those of La Guayra, Havana, or San Juan de Ulúa—or of the penitentiaries named in the classic songs of Bruant. In the matter of imprisonment
we had outdistanced Europe—a logical state of things, since as members of the Continent-of-the-Future we must make a start somewhere.

But while the finishing touches were being put to the Model Prison, the country was falling sick of a crisis; most disappointingly threatening to the fertility of an exceptionally rich if virgin soil, giving fabulous promise of productivity under cultivation, age-old humus, a boundless supply of wood (forests covering an area as large as the whole of Belgium), and rich underground seams of invaluable minerals. We had them all: space, land, fruit, nickel, iron. We were a privileged country in the World of the Future. Such was the report of the Ministry of Agriculture and Public Works. To realise the splendour of our earthly benefits we had only to follow the convincing picture given by statistics, organograms, columns of figures, weekly balance sheets, expert comments, futurological equations enhanced by the eloquent presence of a well-placed letter from the Greek alphabet. But though these memoranda and bound reports were brought to him every day after the unfortunate opera season was over, and considered retrospectively in financial terms, the Head of State realised that, as a background to these orchestral preludes and tenor cadenzas, the sugar supply of the republic had suffered an alarming drop compared with rubber and slate in world markets. Our sugar was fetching 23 centavos a pound when Nicoletti-Korman, a magnificent devil, was sending up prayers to the Golden Calf. With the North American anthem in the first act of
Madame Butterfly
, it fell to 17.20. It was quoted at 11.35 during
Thaïs—
“
Alexandria, terrible cité
,” sang Titta Ruffo. On the disastrous day of
Rigoletto
—and hunchbacks are supposed to bring good luck—it fell to 8.40. The cheating at cards in the fourth act of
Manon
hastened the collapse, which with the catastrophe of
Aida
left us at 5.22.
And when carnival time came, sugar—by far the most important substance in the whole of agricultural Latin America—had slumped, with warehouses full of unsold sacks, to 2.15 a pound.

And suddenly one morning, as if nothing had happened, the recently founded Banco International announced that it was suspending payments until further notice. The Banco Español, the Banco Miranon, the Banco Comercial y Agricola, and the Banco de la Construccion shut down their guichets with a sharp click, while the Banco Nacional and the Clearing House filled the newspapers with communiqués and information, promises, calls for confidence and calm, in order to stem a panic that had started from small savings books registering minimal family accounts and ascended to the realms of high finance. The situation was described as “accidental and temporary” in the newspapers, and a cabinet meeting was called to consider it. The government asked for calm, confidence, and patriotism. No queuing or disturbances. A moratorium—a word unknown to the public, but whose sound had for some of them a disagreeable relationship with death and wills—was proposed as a certain means of straightening out the confusion in a few weeks; this brought relief to the minds of many, and as it was carnival time, the Festival of Masks opened in a clamour of processions, Chinese trumpeters, and negro drummers, with fancy-dress parades including cars decked with much ingenuity, such as the “Venetian Bucentaur,” which won a special prize although it had been tremendously difficult to get it as far as the judges’ dais, since its prow crowded with female doges dressed in sequins was too high to get under the telephone wires. All this revelry had come at a fortunate time, because it had always been important to the life of the country, and people forgot their troubles and dangers when absorbed in this multitudinous
catharsis. At this time funerals were without mourners, telephones without operators, bakers had no flour, and babies at the breast no milk. People were dancing, singing, joining processions, abandoning themselves without regard to discipline or timetables, commitments or promises, to satisfying the desires they had accumulated during months of repression. A lot of women were naked under their dominoes. Everyone did as they liked under the protection of hood, veil, or tawdry mask. People sang and danced in the parks, on terraces roofed with vines; cafés were taken by storm. They fornicated on the upper floors of the National Observatory, under the arches of bridges, in halls decorated with holy images and in suburban shrubberies, and even installed themselves in church porches to drink sugar-cane spirit, tequila, and aguardiente. These were days when dusk merged into dawn and dawn into dusk, when the traditional fraternities used heron feathers and raffia to polish up their magic chains, diabolical costumes, cardboard sharks, serpents worked by a spring, hawk-men, carnival dragons, grotesques, old figures inherited from Africa or from rituals whose original purpose was lost in aboriginal darkness. What with dancing and paper streamers, competitions, beauty queens, gilt cardboard crowns, giants and monstrous heads, turbans and stilts, a long week went by in pleasure, swaggering, musical rhythms, drunkenness, and hangovers. But suddenly, in the middle of this tumultuous jollity, one or two harlequins with their faces covered in black stockings fired at the police; one or two gypsies from the cast of
Carmen
, who had failed to return the Winchesters borrowed from the smugglers’ scene, seized the rifles and revolvers from the Santa Barbara barracks and loaded them into Red Cross ambulances; members of the Pompadour processions, dressed in salmon pink, with their wigs pulled down over their eyes, threw a bomb into the police station of the
Fifth District, setting free more than forty political prisoners. In the police station of the Second District, some of our Indians, apparently high on mescal but disguised as Red Indians from North America in imitation of Vitagraph films they had seen, cleared a secret arsenal of its hand grenades and then disappeared among the crowd; three anarchist leaders were rescued from their cells by false agents from the Secret Services; a snowstorm of proclamations and manifestos fell from the spire of the Sacred Heart and the cupola of the Capitol, calling for a revolutionary rising. But now, to the report of rockets and firecrackers from the familiar troupes of clowns, reports with a sharper repercussion were added. The harmless bottles of ethyl chloride intended to be pushed down the front of women’s dresses were replaced by tear-gas bombs, an amazing invention being used for the first time by the police; the cavalry charged at random against strolling players and allegorical groups; the screeching of carnival whistles and cardboard trumpets was transformed into the cries of the trampled and wounded, and fancy dress gave way in panic to military uniforms. A whole rainbow of different colours became neutralised into the twofold range of indigo and buff. A violent presidential decree suspended the carnival there and then, and the Model Prison quickly filled with masks. There were the yells and gasps of the dying, tightening of garrottes, dentists’ drills boring into sound teeth, beating with sticks and whips, kicking in the balls, men hung up by their heels and wrists or revolving on cartwheels for days on end, naked women pursued through the corridors, thrown to the ground with legs apart and violated, their breasts burned, their flesh penetrated with red-hot irons. There were fictitious shootings and real shootings; blood and lead from Mausers spattered the newly built walls, still smelling of mortar; and there were defenestrations, strappados, piercing with nails, and people
herded to the great Olympic Stadium, where there was more room to machine-gun a crowd together—thus avoiding the loss of time involved in forming shooting parties; and there were those who were shut in great rectangular boxes filled with cement and the blocks so formed were lined up against one wall of the prison, in such numbers that the neighbours thought they must contain stones for enlarging the building … (And many years passed before it was discovered that each of these blocks contained a body in fancy dress and mask, moulded by the hard material surrounding it—a perfect record of a human anatomy within a solid substance.)